Nabuma Rubberband

During the recording process of Little Dragon's fourth LP, singer Yukimi Nagano wandered around the band’s longtime hometown of Gothenberg in winter while listening to Janet Jackson. When Nagano and the band don’t stick too closely to dance music or downtempo on the album, the results are adventurous.

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Yukimi Nagano sums up her approach to Little Dragon’s fourth LP, Nabuma Rubberband, in a R&B-flavored sound bite at the end of the record. “Let go of everything I know,” she sings over a booming, slow-rolling bounce on “Let Go”. Speaking to Rolling Stone late last year, the Swedish-Japanese vocalist explained that, for this record, the Gothenburg-based band started with nothing—no ideas, no vision, no plan. “We dove into different worlds,” she said. “New spaces we haven't been to before.” Some of that uncharted territory turned out to be more familiar than suggested: the interactive website that factored in the album's unveiling was set in Nagano’s pleasantly kitschy home studio, and during the recording process she wandered around the band’s longtime hometown of Gothenberg in winter while listening to Janet Jackson.

This wintry mix of fresh and familiar suffuses Nabuma Rubberband, which opens as if Nagano stepped inside from one of these walks with “Twenty Foreplay” stuck in her head and started writing before her fingers uncramped from the cold. The intermittent thuds throughout “Mirror” depart noticeably from the magnetic rhythms of 2011's Ritual Union, hinting at the album's changing focus. Though their very first release, 2006’s Twice, showcased Nagano’s voice with spacious, somber piano chords, she said in another interview that Little Dragon felt self-conscious about writing “slow jams”. It took them another three years to arrive at the Prince-indebted funky freakouts of 2009's Machine Dreams, as well as the beat-focused collaborations with SBTRKT, Gorillaz, and Dave Sitek’s Maximum Balloon project that followed.

Little Dragon's continued to explore the dichotomy between dance music and downtempo since, and when Nagano doesn’t stick too closely to one or the other on Nabuma Rubberband, the results are more adventurous than on the catchy but slightly underwhelming Ritual Union. There's a Japanese game show-styled interlude (“Lurad”), string accents by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (“Nabuma Rubberbands”, “Pink Cloud”), and “Killing Me”, which coats Machine Dreams’ synthesizer freestyles in grimy noise. It’s nice to know Little Dragon can still pull off the same rhythmic variations and textural contrasts that made their earlier output such a rewarding listen, even if it doesn’t always go smoothly: just when they settle into a groove on the ominous, glittering “Only One”, the song whiplashes to a close with an industrial beat that sounds tacked on.

Nabuma Rubberband's slow jams are perfectly sexy, but they lack originality. Even after repeated listens, the album's velvety sequence of “Pretty Girls”, “Underbart”, and “Cat Rider” fail to leave a lasting impression. Nagano’s beguilingly smoky voice has also lost a little bit of its allure, and when Little Dragon foray into already well-trod territory—there’s even a song called “Paris”, complete with breathy French lyrics—they invariably disappoint. It’s great the band was able to find a throughline between the comfortable and the experimental this time around, but on Nabuma Rubberband they let go of a little too much of themselves in the process.